2008-02-26 12:56MATH 880 PROSEMINAR JT SMITHOUTLINE 14 SPRING 20081. Assignmenta. Continue formulating questions about the paper we’re outlining in class.i. Where should examples go?ii. What about history?iii. What general cleanup and rearrangement is appropriate?b. Continue formulating questions about the social organization of mathematics.2. Refereeinga. In outline 5 I mentioned the process of publishing a mathematical paper. Oneselects an appropriate journal and sends the manuscript to a managing editor.That editor farms it out to a more specialized editor generally familiar withthe subject, who then selects a referee who is really expert. The referee checksevery detail and recommends for, against, and/or suggests revisions required.b. Who are these editors? Professors, and a few industrial mathematicians.c. I showed how to navigate through the Department website to Prof. Gube-ladze’s website, which indicates that he is an editor of the journal Algebra andNumber Theory. Dean Axler’s site reveals that he has served as an editor ofthe Mathematical Intelligencer and the American Mathematical Monthly.d. Who are the referees? Professors, and a few industrial mathematicians.e. The refereeing process is nominally double-blind. That is, neither author orreferee is informed of the identity of the other. Of course, for a typical re-search paper there are probably at most ten individuals who are familiarenough with its subject to write it or readily check its details. And authorscommonly post in public drafts of their papers in preparation.f. Refereeing a major research paper can take weeks of intense effort.g. This editing and refereeing are generally done for free: professionals mathe-maticians regard it as part of their jobs.h. After a paper is accepted for publication, the author collaborates with aneditor on the final editing and composition. Some of the editors in thatprocess work for the publisher.3. MathSciNeta. We’ve seen that various journals publish book reviews.b. But so far I hadn’t mentioned explicitly the sources of reviews of researchpapers.c. For mathematics in general, the premier source is MathSciNet, part of thewebsite of the American Mathematical Society. Our Internet access is paidfor by SFSU. To gain access via an off-campus connection, you must identifyyourself to our Library’s proxy server. d . MathSciNet reviews virtually every research paper in mainstream mathemat-ics, overlapping into some adjacent disciplines. Reviews seem to be postedrather promptly these days.Page 2 MATH 880 SPRING 2008 OUTLINE 142008-02-26 12:56e. We looked up reviews of Smith 2002, Gubeladze and Mushkudiani 2006, andScott and Suppes 1958, all of which have had some previous attention in classor by individual students.f. Reviews are provided both in LATEX, which is unreadable, and in *.pdffiles, which are fine. Nowadays reviews are generally in English, the currentinternational language of mathematics. But the review of Scott and Suppes1958 was in German: half a century ago English was less widespread.g. The Society probably receives tables of contents and abstracts of papers asthey’re published by the hundreds of mathematics journals. Its managementclassifies them and sends them to willing reviewers who know the areas.h. Reviewing a published research article is not as time-consuming as refereeingone before publication, because it has already been vetted and to some extentedited for reader comprehensibility. But I suspect that reviewing a papertakes on average about a week. Reviewers are not paid. They regard review-ing as part of their responsibility as professional mathematicians.i. I haven’t been a MathSciNet reviewer, but Prof. Gubeladze has: the searchengine listed 53 reviews by him.j. You should get in the habit of reading reviews before you attempt to read apaper. It doesn’t take long and may provide essential information that you’dspend hours digging out of the paper.4. Other contemporary review sourcesa. Several specialized journals publish reviews of most research papers in theirareas. Sometimes these papers are also reviewed in MathSciNet. Often, sincethe management of MathSciNet knows those papers will be reviewed else-where, its own review is cursory.b. Computer Science: I believe the Association for Computing Machinery hasa service comparable to MathSciNet, but I haven’t checked it recently.c. Logic and Foundations: the Journal of Symbolic Logic reviews in this area,and all but its most recent five years are accessible on the Internet via JStor.Use the JStor search engine.d . Zentralblatt MATH. This German online resource continues a previoushardcopy reviewing journal. It publishes abstracts prepared by the authorsof papers. I’m not familiar with it.5. Historical sourcesa . MathSciNet was formerly the hardcopy journal Mathematical Reviews, whichstarted publication in 1940.b. How do you find reviews of papers and books published earlier?c. Look in Jahrbuch über die Fortschritte der Mathematik. It served the samepurpose with hardcopy from about 1868 to about 1942, and is now availableon the Internet. “About” means that it was slow getting started, and died aslow death from the mid 1920s on. Some of its editors migrated to the U.S.during the 1930s and started what has become MathSciNet. Most of theJahrbuch reviews are more detailed than you would expect nowadays inMathSciNet, but of course, they’re generally in